Dulce Et Decorum Est, Essay Example

The history of human civilization was characterized with more occasions of war and conflict rather than peace and stability. While war remains an inevitable feature of human reality, its perception changes with time. In the Ancient times, it was essential for the survival of one tribe over another, securing access to the resources. In the Middle Ages and the epoch of Romanticism, the war was idealized through the idealistic images of patriotism and servitude to one’s country, protecting the loved ones and demonstration of one’s manliness and maturity. However, with the introduction of the total war into human history, the emphasis in the perception of war has changed towards the reflection of its ugliness and inhuman nature. The aim of this paper is to explore how different types of art literary memoir, visual images and a piece of poetry managed to create strong anti-war narratives. In this regard, Remarque’s “All Quiet On the Western Front,” Otto Dix’s “Der Krieg”/“War” and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” are analyzed. The central thesis of this paper is that all three works of art demonstrated the anti-war narrative through humanization of the war and demonstration its ruinous impact on human body and soul conditioned by its dirty, bloody and monstrous nature. Thus, all three authors demonstrate the reality of war and its idealistic perception used for the achievement of political goals.

Remarque’s “All Quiet On the Western Front” tells a story of a young soldier Paul Baumer, who together with twenty other class mates joined the German Army during the World War I, due to the patriotic inspirations introduced by their teacher. The story is told from the day-to-day experiences of soldiers, the lack of supplies, injuries, cold, dirt and death. The author pays attention to the change of physical and psychological state of a soldier during war demonstrated in the exact cases of Paul and his friends, how Paul loses connection with the civil life at home, cannot feel anything human anymore and how an attempt to return to his creative origins gets him killed at the end of the story (Remarque 1987).

The anti-war narrative is, first of all, demonstrated through the personification of the soldiers and the impact of war experience on the individual human lives. To achieve this Remarque uses the main character as a narrator of the story. It is aimed to create a psychological bond between Paul (his feelings, sufferings) and the reader. Remarque combine’s narrator’s perspective, point of view technique together with the detailed description of individual physical and emotional conditions in order to make the target audience feel like being there at war. For instance, he writes: “inside the gas-mask my head booms and roars – it is nigh bursting; my lungs are tight, they breathe always the same hot, used-up air, and the veins on my temples are swollen” (Remarque 1987, 70). This description makes the reader feel like he is the one suffocating and separated by the gas-mask from death. Thus, the primary means of creating the anti-war narrative is through making personal to the audience through the connection to the narrator and his feelings.

Another essential element of creating the anti-war narrative is making death more palpable, demonstrating its ugliness and bloody nature instead of the idealized valor of the epic days. In this regard, Remarque creates the images of bloody, painful and dirty death without any meaning or dignity in it. Describing one of the injured, the author writes: “we lay the hip bare; it is one mass of mincemeat and bone splinters. The joint has been hit. This lad won’t walk anymore” (Remarque 1987, 71). This description shows the severity of war to the individual human being, the person that lost an ordinary pleasure of full functioning and living a normal life. It is the deprivation of humanity in the injured, and their perception as the lost cause by the other make death and injury so gruesome at the event of war. The same idea was demonstrated by Dix and Owen. In the series of his paintings, Dix demonstrated battlefield not as epic fights of valor but as field full of pieces of human corps, insides, blood and pieces of bones on various stages of decomposition combined with dehumanized images of the survivals. In this case, just as Remarque, Dix shows the ugliness of death at war and how it mutilates the memory of the dead and scars the living, which he demonstrated by drawing the survivals pale and ghostlike, for surviving the war, the remain nothing but ghosts of themselves. While Remarque describes injuries and dead bodies in simplified means to an end matter, which is aimed at objectification of human bodies at war, Owen uses detailed description of human suffering in a more philosophical way: “and watched the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as cud” (Owen 1918).

Except for the description of the ugliness of death, the anti-war narrative is also created through the demonstration of the new technologies of warfare that have no honor in killing enemies but remains a simple tool of annihilation. Aforementioned Owen’s description demonstrates the death from a gas attack that has not dignity in its use, only the achievement of the final objective – killing the enemy. In his works, Dix outlined this shift in war and its inhuman nature through the drawing of survivals wearing gas-masks and showing the dead bodies with facial erosions and other signs of chemical weapon use. Remarque writes that the condition of the soldiers effected by chlorine gas “is hopeless, they choke to death with haemorrhages and suffocation” (Remarque1987, 131). This type of death on the war is far from the idealized Arthurian epic valor of swords and tactical warfare used by various armies to recruit soldiers. The three authors showed that the total war had nothing to do with the honor of dying; it was just a massacre and tragedy of humanity.

Another element of the anti-war narrative was the demonstration of the cheapness of human life and the lack of support or responsibility of the higher command for the lower-rank soldiers.  The best example of this is how on various occasions Remarque shows that senior officers did not bother even to train new recruits, which inevitably resulted in their high death rate. They were basically left on their own to survive: “Some of them in a shell hole took off their masks too soon; they did not know that the gas lies longest in the hollows; when they saw others on top without masks they pulled theirs off too and swallowed enough to scorch their lungs” (Remarque 1987, 131). Furthermore, individual life is of little value at war. It does not matter for the commander; it surely does not matter for political decision-makers that start wars. Remarque showed it on a few more occasions. In a symbolical sense, it was shown in the pair of boots that Katczinsky took off a dead soldier’s body. These boots were transferred from one friend of Paul to another after the death of each of them. These boots symbolize the cheapness of human life at war, where a pair of boots was more costly, and lived longer that people who could use those boots. The absence of the value of human life at war was also demonstrated in the last paragraph of the novel. While Paul, who was the corner stone of the narration and the key connection with the reader, dies, for the war he was fighting it was of no importance, in the military report it was “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Remarque 1987, 296).

Regarding the transference of the written text into a film, there are certain themes and concepts that can be more vivid in the film format. In this regard, the imagery of the ugliness and bloody nature of warfare can be better demonstrated through the film, since a film can enhance visualization of the war and its horrors. Thus, explicit graphic images of dead bodies and physical human suffering can be easier transferred by the means of film. On the other hand, the reflection of the psychological change of people under the influence of the war is better achieved through the original text, since it makes the experience more intimate. In terms of the impact of the visualization of the film on one’s understanding of the historical period, the film might be probably more helpful since it pays more detailed to the tools of that time, technological advancement, ammunition, uniform, since it all should be authentic. On the other hand, the book does not need to describe all of these details and concentrates on human experience.

Overall, from all mentioned above it can be concluded that the anti-war narrative developed by Remarque, Dix and Owen is based on making war closer to one’s personal perception. The humanization of war is achieved through the personification of soldiers and making their experiences sensible by the readers. Other elements of the anti-war narrative include the palpable sense of death and human sufferings; devaluation of human life; the lack of unity among different ranks of soldiers and the ugliness of death from new chemical weapons that deprived battlefield death of any valor or meaning. Thus, irrespective of the type of the art, the anti-war narrative was based on the same concept – demonstrating the reality of war in all its embodiments.

Bibliography

Owen, Wilfred. 1918. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” The War Poetry Website. Accessed March 30, 2015.  http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html.

Remarque, Erich Maria. 1987. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Fawset Books.